"Quitters Raga"

There's something awesome about the way chopped-up vocals have come back around in the last couple of years. They were all over the place in the early part of the decade, when IDM was being taken seriously and rapidly accelerating CPU clockspeeds meant that a new way to process sounds lurked around every corner. Back then, you took a CD of a voice and made it skip and that was enough to give a track an extra twist of poignancy. Now it's in the realm of dubstep and all of its offshoots where the most interesting vocal processing is taking place, often as a way to add tension to mean, heavy, bass-heavy beats. Terrific recent examples of the form have come from Blue Daisy and Pariah, but this powerful track from Gold Panda, recently released on a 7" single via Make Mine, ups the ante for affecting vocal processing considerably. An undercurrent of bass flecked with vinyl crackles pushes the track along, but it's the voices, bits of guitar and sitar, all given the sonic Cuisinart treatment, that take things to another, more achingly beautiful realm. The fragmentation gets more intense as it goes, and you start to wonder if the track is going to shake itself apart, and then it ends suddenly, less than two minutes in, so short it breaks your heart.